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A band of patriots dressed as Indians mixed chests of British tea with Boston Harbor water to serve a brew of rebellion.

Colonial Williamsburg

Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre aimed to stir up patriot outrage.

Colonial Williamsburg

Engraving of Bostonian Samuel Adams, after the 1862 portrait by Alonzo Chappell

Library of Congress

The “Tea-Tax Tempest” and the Revolution, seen in the long view. Father Time flashes a magic lantern picture of an exploding teapot to America on the left and Britannia on the right, with patriots advancing, right, and redcoats, left. The 1778 engraving is attributed to a German artist, Carl Guttenberg.

Colonial Williamsburg

Tongue-in-cheek newspaper complaint about tea-tasting fish

Trouble Brewing

Rally, Mohawks!

by Ivor Noël Hume

Editor’s note:We are taught that history repeats
itself and so assume that the Tea Party movement of
our time is the direct descendent of the Boston party
of 1773. In name, it is, and there are similarities in
that the press has played a major role in both and
change is a theme of each. At its outset, the colonial
Tea Party was regionally focused and attended by
Massachusetts and Rhode Island radicals. But Samuel
Adams and Paul Revere bore no resemblance to
today’s populist protesters.

Tea Time in Boston
Hark–or does the Muse’s ear
Form the sounds she longs to hear–
Hark! From yonder western main
O'er the white wave echoing far,
Vows of duty swell the strain,
And drown the notes of war.

The acrid odors of war and rebellion were
already wafting from yonder western main
and more specifically from the direction of
Boston, Massachusetts. In London, Parliament heard
that colonial opposition to its laws originated in the
colony that “had been always instigated to such conduct,
by the irregular and seditious proceedings of
the town of Boston.”

Differing from Virginia and Williamsburg, Boston
and Providence, Rhode Island, were centers for
general international trade. Their movers and shakers
were merchants for whom any limits on their
commerce were seen as an invasion of their rights
as free men. In Virginia, the leaders were planters,
many of them with ties to well-born English families,
their incomes derived from tobacco and less from
the retail sale of paper, paint, glass, lead, or tea.
In 1767, the English chancellor of the exchequer,
Charles Townshend, imposed duties on those commodities and sent
ships and customs officers backed by soldiers to ensure that they were enforced. Neither their presence nor their methods were well received in New England.

Boston radical Samuel Adams was one of three who composed a circular letter, distributed under the seal of the Massachusetts General Court, arguing that a man’s honestly acquired possessions were his and could not be taken from him without his consent–meaning that they could not be taxed by any authority other than that of his colonial assembly. In short, the slogan became “No taxation without representation.”

Once a slogan or an idea takes wing, otherwise
self-centered and law-abiding people turn private
whispers into public shouting. And so it was in Boston
after the Townshend Acts were imposed. When
the philosophically reasonable but rabble-rousing
letter reached London, the British Government ordered
Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson
to demand its withdrawal. The colony’s General
Court, however, defied the governor and voted 92–17 to let it stand, thus ensuring that the numbers
92 and 17 would be added to the circulating slogans.

Sympathetic resolutions were passed in the Virginia
Assembly, and in normally loyal and low-key
Philadelphia, lawyer John Dickinson published his
own letter declaring that though taxes regulating
trade were constitutional, those imposed to enhance
British revenues were not. The Townshend Acts were
not trade regulating but were raised to cover Britain’s
cost of governing the colonies–which included
paying handsome salaries to its colonial officials. It
could be argued, therefore, that the colonists were being required to
dip into their pockets to subsidize officers not of their choosing. This was the kind of response that employees voice when they learn the size of their bosses’ bonuses and expense accounts.

The first so-called shots heard around the world were fired not at Lexington in 1775 but in Boston on March 5, 1770, when British troops of the 29th Regiment were goaded by a gang of rock and snowball hurling thugs into firing shots that killed five of the activists. Paul Revere and his fellow radicals saw it differently. He published a broadsheet illustrating the event and titled it “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston.” Perhaps emphasizing the innocence of the rioters, Revere showed a dog standing in the foreground of the blood-spattered crowd. This was wonderful propaganda, enhanced by doggerel that declared that the soldiers,

The Boston news media were having a field day, and it mattered little that the five dead were reported as seven.

In the following months, some colonists saw the
English redcoats in that light, and hooligans having
fun in the name of patriotism subjected them to individual
nocturnal attacks. These were Boston’s amateur
foot soldiers contributing to the cause of freedom.
Although such intimidation appalled many of Boston’s
older citizens, men like the thirty-five-year-old Paul Revere were
wooing a younger generation of hotheads that included journeymen and apprentices
and at least one black American, Crispus Attucks, whose life ended on King Street that day in March 1770.

The Boston Massacre was dismissed in England as mob violence put down in the way it would in London, where civil disobedience was common and similarly treated.

Although Samuel Adams and his small circle of radicals did
what they could to keep the fire of rebellion alive,
the next two years saw Anglo-American relations
greatly improved. Lord North had become prime
minister of a conciliatory government, and the king
withdrew Townshend’s tariff on all the essential
imports save for the tea, which was seen as a luxury.
His ministers had not considered that the hostesses
of tea parties in Boston and elsewhere would
thereby be encouraged to interest themselves in the
politics of their menfolk. Nevertheless, the removal
of the commodity tariffs were a relief to masons,
carpenters, printers, and the like, and so restored
the status quo–a condition not at all to the liking of
Adams and his similarly minded associates.

The night of June 9, 1772, provided exactly
what Adams needed. While chasing a smuggler
into Narragansett Bay, the British revenue
schooner Gaspee ran aground. The ship had
been on station since January, its presence a constant
irritant to the contraband-prone merchants of
Providence, Rhode Island. Their annoyance had been
stoked by radical Solomon Southwick, editor of the Newport Mercury, whose February 24 issue called the Gaspee a piratical
schooner belonging to George III, who should have known better than “to keep
men of war employed in robbing some of the poorest subjects.”

Who it was who saw the Gaspee run aground and rallied local patriots to attack it has never been proven. But attack it they did, burning the ship to its waterline. When the news reached England, Parliament ordered a commission to be created
in Massachusetts to identify the attackers and ship them to England to stand trial.
That intent was imparted to Governor Hutchinson in a letter from Secretary of State Lord Dartmouth. But as so often happens, the confidential directive was leaked to the press and generated outraged editorials in the Newport Mercury and Providence Gazette to further stoke the republican fire.

On December 26, 1772, the Gazette reported
that troops were being sent from Massachusetts
and New York to police Rhode Island, an intrusion,
it said, likely to repeat the outrage that “made the
5th of March so memorable in Boston.”

The so-called Boston Massacre had thus been
converted from a riot to a republican cause célèbre.
It is true that troops were sent to Rhode
Island, but they entered Newport unopposed; yet,
when that news reached Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia
Gazette in Williamsburg, readers were told
that “eighteen of the Rhode Island People were
wounded and about six of them killed,” and “some
of the Regulars were slain.”

The power of a politically motivated press was driving
King George’s northern colonies to the cliff’s edge.

On the other side of the world, mismanagement
by Britain’s contractors in India was occupying
the attention of Parliament. The East
India Company, which for nearly two centuries had
governed itself, was subjected to seven new rules of
operation that transferred most of its authority to the
crown.

To secure the acquiescence of the company’s shareholders,
however, its existing stock of 17,000,000
pounds of tea could be exported duty free to any market
without the normal requirement that it first be
landed and taxed in England. Consequently, the price
could be lowered, and at no cost to the shippers the
chests of tea could be sent directly to company consignees
in America, where the duty was still levied at three
pence a pound.

Vocal patriots urged that the ships should be
turned away and appealed to Governor Hutchinson to
so order. When he declined, and company agents were
still expecting to legally receive the tea, Bostonians did
what they considered necessary to ensure that they
did not. On the afternoon of December 16, 1773, at a
meeting in the home of Benjamin Edes, part owner of
the Boston Gazette, Adams, Josiah Quincy Jr., and others
laid plans to prevent the tea from being brought
ashore.

At the Gazette office, the conspirators disguised
themselves as Indians and gathered with 200 likeminded
friends and neighbors at the South Church.
There, Adams gave the order to repair to the Green
Dragon Inn, where other sympathizers joined them.
Together, and in silence, they made their way to Griffin’s
wharf, where the East India Company ships were
riding, ostensibly protected by British men-of-war.
Unopposed, indeed unnoticed, the militants boarded
the anchored tea-laden ships, politely called on their
captains to surrender the keys to their holds, hauled
the crates onto their decks, broke them open with
their pseudo-Indian hatchets, and tossed 342 chests of
tea into the harbor. The deed done, no other cargo was
touched, and the “Mohawks” peacefully went home.

The men-of-war in the harbor had done nothing
to prevent the outrage, probably because they did not
know what was going on until it was too late. The following
morning, ignoring the warships, boats manned
by concerned citizens put out into the harbor and
drowned any chests that were still floating. A week later John Hancock said that “No one
circumstance could possibly have taken place more
effectively to unite the Colonies than this manouvre
of the Tea.”

In London, on January 29, 1774, Benjamin Franklin
appeared before the Privy Council to defend a petition
from the Province of Massachusetts demanding
action against Governor Hutchinson for his refusal to
comply with the colonists’ instructions. The petition
was rejected, and Dr. Franklin was told that it was
“groundless, vexatious, scandalous, and calculated
only for the seditious purposes of keeping up a spirit
of clamour and discontent in the province.”

The Boston Tea Party entered world history
as a solitary event. Nevertheless, the
arrival of East India Company ships in
such other ports as Philadelphia and Charleston
prompted comparable attention, being turned
away, their tea destroyed, or landed and impounded.
But it had been that gathering of Mohawks at
the Green Dragon that found its way into patriotic
verse:

Rally, Mohawks! bring out your axes,
And tell King George we'll pay no taxes
On his foreign tea;
His threats are vain, and vain to think
To force our girls and wives to drink
His vile Bohea!
Then, rally, boys, and hasten on
To meet our chiefs at the Green Dragon.

Williamsburg’sIvor Noël Humecontributed to
the summer 2011 journal a story about Jamestown laws. The University of Virginia Press last autumn published his autobiography, A Passion for the Past: The Odyssey of a Transatlantic Archaeologist. ISBN: 978-0-8139-2977-4, $29.95 hardcover.

Suggestions for further reading:

Anonymous, The Annual Register, or a View of the History,
Politics, and Literature for the Year 1774 (London,
1775).

John R. Alden, A History of the American Revolution
(New York, 1969).

William Bell Clark, ed., Naval Documents of the American
Revolution (Washington, DC, 1964).

Extra Images

The BOSTONIAN’S Paying the EXCISE-MAN, or TARRING & FEATHERING. The 1774 print depicts the tarring and feathering of a British customs official in Boston as he spews out the tea poured into his mouth. The Boston Tea Party is shown in the background.

“The Boston Evening Post” addresses the taxation of tea in America, April 25, 1774. Printed by Thomas and John Fleet.